Four short links: 20 October 2009

Politics in The Age of Social Software, Ethernet Patents, Free Book Fear, Programming Exercises

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 7

1. Poles, Politeness, and Politics in the Age of Twitter (Stephen Fry) -- begins with a discussion of a UK storm but rapidly turns into a discussion of fame in the age of Twitter, modern political discourse, the "deadwood press", and The Commons in Twitter Assembled. There is an energy abroad in the kingdom, one that yearns for a new openness in our rule making, our justice system and our administration. Do not imagine for a minute that I am saying Twitter is it. Its very name is the clue to its foundation and meaning. It is not, as I have pointed out before, called Ponder or Debate. It is called Twitter. But there again some of the most influential publications of the eighteenth century had titles like Tatler, Rambler, Idler and Spectator. Hardly suggestive of earnest political intent either. History has a habit of choosing the least prepossessing vessels to be agents of change.
2. Apple and Others Hit With Lawsuit Over 90s Ethernet Patents -- unclear whether the plaintiff is 3Com (who filed the patents) or a troll who bought them. "We strongly believe that 3Com’s Ethernet technologies are being regularly infringed by foreign and some US companies," said David A. Kennedy, Chief Executive Officer of U.S. Ethernet Innovations. "We believe that the continued aggressive enforcement of the fundamental Ethernet technologies developed by 3Com against the waves of cheap, knock-off, foreign manufactured equipment is a necessary step in protecting the competitiveness of this American technology and American companies in general." (via Slashdot)
3. The Point -- someone's publishing Mark Pilgrim's "Dive into Python", which was published by APress under an open content license. Naturally this freaked out APress (it's easy to imagine many eyelids would tic nervously should such a thing happen with one of O'Reilly's open-licensed books). Mark's response is fantastic. Part of choosing a Free license for your own work is accepting that people may use it in ways you disapprove of. There are no “field of use” restrictions, and there are no “commercial use” restrictions either. In fact, those are two of the fundamental tenets of the “Free” in Free Software. If “others profiting from my work” is something you seek to avoid, then Free Software is not for you. Opt for a Creative Commons “Non-Commercial” license, or a “personal use only” freeware license, or a traditional End User License Agreement. Free Software doesn’t have “end users.” That’s kind of the point.
4. Programming Praxis -- programming exercises to keep your skills razor-sharp, with solutions.

Four short links: 14 October 2009

Multitouch Demo, Secrets Site Secrets, Hadoop Futures, Becoming Lucky

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 0

1. 10Gui Video -- demo of a new take on multitouch, a tablet and new GUI conventions. (via titine on Twitter)
2. Behind the Scenes at WhatDoTheyKnow -- numbers and stories from the MySociety project, which provides a public place for Official Information Act requests and responses. The fact information is subject to copyright and restrictions on re-use does not exempt it from disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act (though there is a closely related exemption relating to “commercial interest”). Occasionally public bodies will offer to reply to a request, but in order to deter wider dissemination of the material they will refuse to reply via WhatDoTheyKnow.com. Southampton University have released information in protected PDF documents and the House of Commons has refused to release information via WhatDoTheyKnow.com which it has said it would be prepared to send to an individual directly.
3. The View from HadoopWorld (RedMonk) -- fascinating glimpse into the Hadoop user and developer world. Hadoop can be used with a variety of languages, from Perl to Python to Ruby, but as Doug Cutting admitted today, they’re all second class citizens relative to Java. The plan, however, is for that to change. Which can’t happen soon enough, in my view. It’s not that there’s anything intrinsically wrong with Java, or its audience. The point, rather, is that there are lots and lots of dynamic language developers out there that would be far more productive working in their native tongue versus translating into Java.
4. Be Lucky, It's an Easy Skill to Learn (Telegraph) -- this one resonated with me, as it ties into some life hacking I've been doing lately. And so it is with luck - unlucky people miss chance opportunities because they are too focused on looking for something else. They go to parties intent on finding their perfect partner and so miss opportunities to make good friends. They look through newspapers determined to find certain types of job advertisements and as a result miss other types of jobs. Lucky people are more relaxed and open, and therefore see what is there rather than just what they are looking for. (via Hacker News)

Four short links: 1 October 2009

Objectivity Be Gone, Public Screens, Lobbying Patterns, DIY Africa

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 0

1. The End of Objectivity, Web2.0 Version -- Our behaviour as journalists is now measurable. And measurability gives the lie to the pretence that journalists behave like scientists, impartially observing the petri dish of society. (via Pia Waugh)
2. Screens in Context -- ideas for the video screens spring up in place of billboards. Whilst the advertising industry has one of the longest histories of trying to understand interaction, it’s a very different set of tools that digitalness brings; ones that designers at the coal face of web and mobile encounter every day. Everything can be considered in context, be timely, reactive, and data-driven. I’m going to try to outline some dimensions to think about, with some incredibly quick, simple, off the cuff dumb ideas [...] The technology to achieve some of these may be over and above what is possible now, but the biggest step - installing powered, networked computers in the real world - is already being taken by advertising media companies.
3. Interactive Network Map of Lobbying Patterns Around Key Senators in Health Care Reform -- fascinating visualization of political activity, via timoreilly on Twitter)
4. The Doers Club -- How DIY design gave a teenager from Malawi electricity, and can help transform Africa.

How Alan Turing Finally Got a Posthumous Apology

by John Graham-Cumming | @jgrahamc | comments: 21

Guest blogger John Graham-Cumming initiated and led the successful petition drive to procure an apology to Alan Turing from the UK government. John is the author of The Geek Atlas, CTO of a stealth-mode start-up, and a longtime programmer who has a doctorate in computer security. If you're in London this Saturday, September 19, come by the launch party for his book at the Brunel Museum.

There's a long tradition in the UK of direct democracy, with citizens petitioning the Prime Minister themselves. Typically, thousands of signatures are collected on paper and then delivered directly to the Prime Minister's home at No. 10 Downing Street in London. The petitioners arrive at No. 10 and hand the signatures through the open front door.

But the British government has made great strides to bring many aspects of government relations into the electronic age. Through the non-profit MySociety.org the government has created web sites (all with open-source code) for citizens to interact with local and central government offices.

One such web site is the No. 10 Downing Street petitions page (its code is open-source and can be found here).

I used the petitions web site, a collection of Web 2.0 technologies, and a bit of media savvy to successfully petition the government to apologize for the prosecution of the seminal computer scientist Alan Turing.

And I did most of it from the top of a red London double-decker bus using an iPhone.

Alan Turing did three amazing things in his working life: he laid the foundations of computer science by thinking up a theoretical computer called the Turing Machine, he worked through the Second World War breaking Nazi German codes, and after the war he worked on artificial intelligence and defined the Turing Test. His life was cut short at 41 when he had begun to work on morphogenesis in plants.

Alan Turing was also gay and he was prosecuted for "gross indecency" (essentially being gay) in 1952. To avoid prison he agreed to be injected with female hormones as a sort of 'cure' for homosexuality. Two years after his prosecution he was dead: he killed himself by eating an apple dipped in potassium cyanide.

June 23, 2009 was the anniversary of Alan Turing's birth (he would have been 97) and I posted a blog entry entitled Alan Turing deserves an apology from the British Government. It generated a few comments and I posted a follow-up entry the next day with an example of how I would apologize for my government's actions in 1952.

That night I created a petition on the No. 10 Downing Street web site asking for a government apology for the treatment of Alan Turing.

On August 4, 2009 the petition was approved and made public. I mentioned it on my blog, on Twitter, on Facebook, and posted it to Y Combinator's Hacker News. At the time I thought I'd have a hard time getting 500 people to sign. Little did I know the petition would gather over 30,000 signatures in 37 days and elicit an incredible apology from the British Prime Minister Gordon Brown preceded by a personal call to my mobile phone.

This chart shows the number of signatures per day between August 4, 2009 and September 10, 2009. (click for larger view)

The same day the story appeared on Reddit. Signatures started to come in slowly.

The next day the petition was picked up by the first journalist to write about it: Jessica Geen of Pink News wrote an online only story which made the story jump over from being covered just by computer scientists and into the LGBT community. The LGBT press would turn out to be a strong ally reporting on the growing petition throughout the campaign.

Four days later, on August 9, 2009 the petition passed 500 signatures. This was the magic level needed to get a government response. I was still pretty skeptical of getting an apology but I certainly wasn't going to be satisfied by 500 names and kept promoting it on Twitter, my blog, and elsewhere.

The first really big break came on August 16, 2009 when the Manchester Evening News wrote about the petition. Manchester was where Alan Turing died and where he had worked before his death. There's a great deal of local pride in Manchester's adopted local boy Alan Turing. The following night I was a guest on BBC Radio Manchester's gay hour.

On August 18, 2009 the petition made the national news with a major story in The Independent, and at the same time the first celebrity name appeared on the list of signatures: Richard Dawkins.

With one celebrity name and national press I began to think the petition might really get noticed. The following night Richard Dawkins and I appeared on Channel 4 News to talk about the petition (Dawkins was filmed looking regal in his garden; I was filmed in classic programmer clothing: bad shoes, dirty shorts and a crumpled shirt). The same day I appeared on the BBC World Service and PRI's The World.

Sitting on the bus each morning I would catch up on email regarding the petition and scan the list of signatures looking for celebrities who I would then try to contact through their agents. I also plotted how to get the story in the press. Anyone who wrote about the story got added to my Turing/Media email list and each morning I would prepare an update on the story with the number of signatures, who had signed and any other events, and send it out.

Over the next week many things happened: I appeared on BBC Radio Ulster, I wrote a letter to Her Majesty The Queen asking her to consider a posthumous knighthood for Alan Turing, the veteran human-rights campaigner Peter Tatchell signed the petition and I received an email from the writer Ian McEwan to say that he had signed.

I knew it was time to get the story out as widely as possible and so I emailed two BBC journalists that I knew to say that I thought the petition was an important story and that they needed to cover it.

Do you think you'd be interested in covering the Alan Turing Petition? It's now got backing from Richard Dawkins and has been covered by BBC Radio Manchester, BBC Radio Northern Ireland, The World Service, Channel 4 News, The Independent, ... Watch: http://www.channel4.com/news/articles/uk/pardon+for+enigma+codebreaker+alan+turing/3315187 for good background. There are now 4,800 signatories. John.

On August 31, 2009 BBC News online covered the story with a long article about the petition, and its celebrity backers. The night before I had gone to bed feeling happy that there were 5,000 signatures on my petition; I woke up to 16,000, by the next morning there were 20,000. That day I appeared on BBC Radio Scotland.

The single enormous leap in signatures in the chart above happened because of the BBC News online story.

On September 1, 2009 I appeared on BBC Radio 4's PM program, CNN covered the campaign, I appeared on CBC's As It Happens, and Stephen Fry signed and tweeted urging his followers to sign.

The same day I received two extraordinary emails. Unbeknownst to anyone I had written to MI5 asking them to release documents about Alan Turing's death in an effort to clear up any doubt about whether his death could have been murder. They denied my request.

The second email came from a member of Alan Turing's surviving family. The BBC report had erroneously said that he had no family. But that was incorrect: Turing's three nieces remembered him well, and he had a surviving nephew.

On the bus home I heard directly that Alan Turing's nieces had many memories of their Uncle Alan. They even still had his teddy bear. I hung up and sat at the back of the bus and cried quietly. I had always felt that Alan Turing's treatment was appalling, but to hear the family speak of the man was too much. I was convinced that I had to see my campaign, which had started on an impulse, to its completion.

Two days later I raced up to Bletchley Park to film the definitive report on the campaign with BBC Newsnight's science editor Susan Watts. The report ran that night and the same day international coverage of the campaign exploded with stories in the major press all over the world. The Newsnight story featured an interview with Alan Turing's nieces and nephew describing the terrible treatment he had endured and giving their blessing to the petition.

On September 7, 2009 I did a final piece of radio, appearing on BBC Radio Ulster. The same day I began to feel unwell with what would turn out to be a nasty bout of flu.

Lying in bed on September 10, 2009 I had to check my email because of a work commitment the following day. In my Inbox was the following email:

John - I wonder if you could call me as a matter of urgency, regarding your petition. Very many thanks! Kirsty Kirsty xxxxxxx 10 Downing St, SW1A 2AA Tel: 020x xxxx xxxx

Of course, I called back! I was told that the apology was coming that night and that "Gordon would like a word with you". At 19:44 that evening my mobile phone rang and I was handed the Prime Minister.

"Hello John. It's Gordon Brown. I think you know why I'm calling you."

Update The nice folks at No. 10 Downing Street and the petitions team released a spreadsheet of the actual day-by-day signatures for the petition period that gives an even clearer picture of the effect of different news outlets (the chart above came from my hand written, sporadic notes). (click for larger view)

Four short links: 16 Apr 2009

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 1

China, databases, storage, and git:

1. China's Complicated Internet Culture (Ethan Zuckerman) -- summary of Rebecca McKinnon's talk at the Berkman Internet Center. Democracy is complex and hard to transition to, online democracy doubly so. Rebecca questions the widespread but unjustified belief that the Great Firewall of China is all that separates Chinese citizens from the empowered liberty of the West, and lays out the tangled state of affairs in China's political Internet. Despite the rise of web video, “no one has managed to organized an opposition party on the web,” Rebecca points out. “There’s no Lech Walenza, no religious movement - Falun Gong has been squished pretty thoroughly.” (via cshirky's delicious stream)
2. Drop ACID and Think About Data -- Bob Ippolito's talk from PyCon about the things you can do easily when you foresake the promises of ACID. More in the ongoing reinvention of databases for the needs of modern web systems. (via cesther's Twitter stream)
3. The Pogoplug -- The Pogoplug connects your external hard drive to the Internet so you can easily share and access your files from anywhere. We're accumulating terabytes of storage at home, where it's very useful to all the computers in the home. This offers an easy way for non-technical civilians to make these drives useful outside the home as well. There are many possibilities for Interesting Things in the massive storage we're accumulating. (via joshua's delicious stream)
4. Gitorious -- open source (AGPLv3) clone of github. (via edd's delicious stream)

Four short links: 10 Feb 2009

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 1

Happy Monday! Kid coding and web-powered political transparency form the artisanal wholewheat organic bread slices around a sandwich filling of meaty (or tofuy) web travel APIs and blogly angst:

1. Art and Code -- conference on programming environments for "artists, young people, and the rest of us". Alice! Hackety Hack! Scratch! Processing! And more! March 7-9 at CMU. Want! (I've written before about my ongoing experiences teaching kids to program)
2. TripIt API -- clever, they're building a single point where hotels, airlines, travel agents, mobile apps, etc. can access your integrated booking (use case: flight delayed, which hotel and mobile car rentals learn and react to by not assuming you've bailed on them) (disclaimer: OATV has invested in TripIt).
3. Organically Grown Audiences (Danny O'Brien) -- good point from Danny that I've been thinking about for a while: maintaining an audience is hard work, and the audience isn't necessarily comprised of people you'd choose to hang out with. Perhaps the answer is to grow the audience slowly, but I'm not convinced. I'd say that unreciprocated intimacy from your audience is a sign that you're doing things wrong, but it's how fame works: the things people say to people in the public eye, on and off the web, are astonishingly presumptuous and familiar. Then again perhaps I should retreat back to the British Isles from which my frosty social distance comes and tend my tweed elbow patch farm until I die from bad teeth, bad beer, or a surfeit of Benny Hill.
4. Promoting Open Government (Economist) -- state and central governments are making expenditure public, in varyingly useful ways. Links to Missouri Accountability Portal and ReadTheStimulus.org (the former as well-designed, the latter as crowd-sourcing).

Four short links: 5 Feb 2009

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 0

Dearest Reader, for today's compendium of brief pointers to the writings of the world's greatest minds features language not suitable for children. So please stop reading this blog post to your child. Please. Think of the children.

1. Don't Work for Assholes (Derek Powazek) -- sound advice that we all have to learn, then relearn.
2. Broadband Stimulus Package Explained by Yochai Benkler -- understanding the state of the bills in House and Senate, what each proposes to spend, where, and why. I, like many, were surprised to learn that the House's bill gives half the money to the Secretary for Agriculture to spend. There is no sarcastic comment I can make about the Secretary of Agriculture that the Internets have now not already made. (via BoingBoing)
3. The Web In The World -- Slideshare presentation by Timo Arnall. Good intro to pervasive computing. "I think the hyperlink is a flawed model for physical interaction. (via Liz Goodman)
4. Offshoring, Does It Ever Work? -- very interesting responses to this question on Stack Overflow. As far as "does it EVER work" concerned: it does. It doesn't work well though. Most people can run, doesn't mean that most people can run as fast as Usain Bolt.

Four short links: 23 Jan 2009

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 3

Potty mouth, piracy, pointers to the future of the web, and Presidential technology woes, all in today's link roundup.

1. F*ck the Cloud - Jason Scott's brilliant (and profanity-strewn) rant about cloud computing and the things people throw away without thinking about. Jason, an Internet historian, has a unique perspective and I think what he says makes a lot of sense. "[I]f you’re not asking what stuff means anything to you, then you’re a sucker, ready to throw your stuff down at the nearest gaping hole that proclaims it is a free service".
2. Pirating the Oscars - Andy Baio summarizes online piracy of the Oscar-nominated movies, as he has done since 2003. It's interesting to see what's new this year: movies are taking longer to leak, but more of them are being leaked.
3. Webkit Owns Mobile - Alex Russell lays out the case that Webkit "has mobile all sewn up". I've been saying for the last umpty years that the Web is at a Windows 286 stage of development--we need 3.1 to come along and standarize the widgets that presently everyone reinvents. I recognized that in this line from Alex: "If we look at the APIs of Dojo, Prototype, or jQuery as a set of suggestions for the APIs that the web should expose, then it becomes pretty clear that we’ve still got a long long way to go".
4. New Staff Find White House Tech in Dark Ages - they've gone from a startup to The Enterprise (not Star Trek, alas, just a big company) and now are learning the pain of IT rules that are bigger than they are.

Software for Civic Life: An Interview with Mike Mathieu of Frontseat.org

by Joshua-Michéle Ross | @jmichele | comments: 3

In this interview Mike Mathieu, founder of Frontseat.org, discusses how he is helping to build “software for civic life”. Using publicly available data and web services (many of their applications use S3 and EC2) Frontseat creates simple, highly functional tools like Walkscore (rating neighborhood walkability) and Countmore (helping students in the recent elections decide which state to cast their vote in). Mike is also behind obamaCTO where you can add your opinion and cast your vote for what the new CTO of the USA’s priorities should be.

With the recent election there has been a lot of talk and enthusiasm for the possibility of a more open, modern government that operates with transparency and makes data available for remixing by it’s citizens. People have their eye on government to change…This is a worthy goal to push for but don’t hold your breath. The government of the United States is a behemoth that, all told, employs 12 million people and is preternaturally territorial and risk averse…

Pressing government to change is necessary but is not the only bet we should place. Mike makes the point in this video that we don’t need to wait for data that can improve civic life or increase transparency in government.

If you know of other examples of citizens improving civic life that deserve mention, please share them in the comments.

Part one of this interview is available here.

It's Not Over: We are "the change we need."

by Tim O'Reilly | @timoreilly | comments: 32

Like a lot of people, I was feeling a bit of post-partum letdown after the election. Those of us who were really engaged, following the polls, making calls to undecided voters, arguing out the merits of the candidates, experienced a bit of a vacuum after the election. Doonesbury summed it up pretty well: "I've been on a constant news drip all year and I can't shut it off."

But of course, the idea that it's over till the next election is, well, "so 20th century." As Barack Obama said in his presidential acceptance speech:

"What began twenty-one months ago in the depths of winter must not end on this autumn night. This victory alone is not the change we seek - it is only the chance for us to make that change. And that cannot happen if we go back to the way things were. It cannot happen without you."

The question, of course, is the right way to get involved. What do we do next?

There are four biggies for the tech community:

1. Actually apply for one of the jobs in the new administration. If there's going to be any substance to the incoming administration's plans for change, there will be a need for people with clue from outside the beltway to join in. And this doesn't just mean more lawyers. There are great technical people who've been working from the outside on government transparency. I'm thinking of folks behind initiatives like the Sunlight Foundation, or Everyblock, or public.resource.org. Heck, I'd even reach out to the geniuses behind mysociety.org in the UK. You do a great job of showing what's possible. I'm wondering whether some of you ought to be on the inside, helping to implement "the change we need." Seeing Kevin Werbach and Susan Crawford as the FCC transition team leads was an awesome wakeup call. Hey, these aren't Washington insiders or telecom lobbyists! They are our peeps from the internet community!

2. Whether inside or out, the tech community can continue to lead by example. I'm imagining legions of bureaucrats saying "it can't be done" countered by demonstration projects that show that "yes we can." I'm remembering Carl Malamud's heroic work putting SEC data online in 1993. The project started with activism by Jamie Love - "you guys ought to do this." Told by the SEC that it would take many years and tens of millions of dollars, Carl got a small team together, built an online database in a few months, and showed them how to do it. After Carl operated the service for two years as a non-profit, the SEC took it over.

   I have a feeling we'll need a lot more of that kind of technology activism by example, as the usual suspects seek to dip into "the great money river" of government spending, driving up the cost, extending the timelines, and reducing the possible impact of the new administration's initiatives.

3. Identifying specific proposals for best practices and points of leverage. We held an open government summit at O'Reilly at the end of last year, and came up with some guiding principles for open data, but we need to identify specific government data sets that could be opened up, specific channels for citizen involvement and oversight, and concrete actions that we can take together to make change. Hopefully, change.gov will become a platform for independent citizen efforts, in the same way that mybarackobama.com was a platform for self-organizing campaign efforts.

4. We really need to weigh in on the issues that matter. From climate change, to open spectrum, to education policy, to investments in science and technology, we need to make our voices heard. There's a lot of discussion on the net, but we need to remember to channel it to the people who are actually making the decisions. If it gets loud enough, maybe they will hear it on their own, but it's good if we can make concerted efforts to bring our suggestions to them via the channels they've provided. Let's give change.gov a chance!

   There was a great example of this recently on twitter. Like a lot of people, I was tweeting about things that ought to be done, when @thesethings wrote:

   all these points re: GM, rails, etc are great. We're submitting all this to change.gov, right?

   Duh. They are opening a channel. We think that one person's voice might be lost. But there are great social networking tools that could be used to aggregate voices, amplifying the signal even before it gets to change.gov. But if we don't direct the messages there, it's less likely to be heard. (Lazyweb call: a hashtag service on twitter that aggregates stuff hashed #change.gov and submits it automagically to change.gov. We also need change.gov to show what's submitted, so it's a conversation, not a combination soapbox/suggestion box. Hopefully, that will come.)

   The weekend after the election, my wife and I held a party at our house, which included an old-fashioned barn dance, complete with fiddler and caller for square dancing. What happened was a great metaphor for how we need to keep each other involved. The nice thing about a square dance is that if you don't have the right number of people, no one can dance. So we'd need two more for a square, and would call out to the people chatting outside: "We need two more!" We'd get three or four. And then, by gum, we'd have to call out, "We've got another square. Now we need six more!" And before long, we had just about everyone dancing. And even people who thought they didn't like to dance, and most certainly not something as old-fashioned as a square dance, had a great time.

   We are "the change we need." Step up and join the dance.

Technology, Politics and Democracy

by Joshua-Michéle Ross | @jmichele | comments: 3

Or, you may download the file.


Recently I spoke with Jascha Franklin-Hodge, CTO and co-founder of Blue State Digital about how technology is affecting politics and democracy in the U.S.

Blue State Digital was born out of Jascha's experience helping Howard Dean’s seminal run for the White House in ’04. and is the technology and strategic services company powering Barack Obama (and many other Democratic leaders and social justice causes like Save Darfur and We Can Solve It).

These videos (there are three total) are timely in light of the staggering September figures from the Obama campaign:

• 630,000 new donors (bringing total donors to 3.1 million)
• 150 million dollars raised
• Average contribution: $86

Here are a few observations I took away from our conversation:
Online U.S. political communities will morph from a campaign fundraising role to a governing role. Regardless of whether Obama or McCain wins in November, every 2012 political campaign, even the laggards, will be as sophisticated as Obama is today- and any campaign with that much momentum won’t be able to stop community participation at the White House door or the Capitol steps (“thanks for all the money and support, I‘ll see you in four years”). Online communities will follow politicians into their governing roles. This summer when MyBarackObama experienced the FISA revolt within his own community this became clear. This has far more transformative potential than the fundraising juggernaut we are seeing now. Powerful communities may come to dominate the agenda of incumbent politicians providing feedback, direction and policy input.

(continue reading)

Book Review: Nudge

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 6

This year has seen a glut of books on topics in that strange area occupied awkwardly by behavioural economics, cognitive psychology, and experimental philosophy. Some fail to distinguish themselves, merely rehashing the many ways in which we aren't perfectly rational creatures. Others, however, find an original angle to tack the last 30 years of work since Daniel Kahneman first thought "but wait, real people don't make rational choices". Nudge (Thaler and Sunnstein, Yale University Press, 2008) is from two leading University of Chicago economists and takes a public policy angle that has been rewarded in the bestseller lists.

The authors (who refer to each other by their last names, even in the blog that accompanies the book, an awkward affectation that makes me picture two 1950s men in suits at a work cocktail party) have coined a new term: libertarian paternalism. By this they mean that policy makers can use your brain's decision-making shortcuts to steer you towards good behaviour while still leaving you free to choose bad. It's opt-out public policy.

Libertarian Paternalism is a brilliant phrase because it has something for everything: libertarianism for the Small Government suit, paternalism for the Smug Liberal. Nudge has been required reading in the halls of English and US power, because it promises that you can have your cake and eat it. You can make decisions for other people, but not be hated by the people who don't like you making decisions for other people! What's not to love?

The book has a simple structure: first the authors walk us through our cognitive biases, the flaws in our decision-making apparatus; then they take us through different real-world scenarios such as social security, healthcare, and education; and finally they deal with objections and suggest future avenues of exploration. In each subject area, the authors suggest "nudges" (the authors endow the word with the same near-religious air that accompanies "social graph" and "RoR" in Web 2.0 circles) that will gently encourage people to do the right thing. For example, we tend to fear losing things more than we anticipate gaining things, so the authors suggest we not immediately deduct money from salaries to increase retirement savings (which would be perceived as a loss) but instead reduce future raises and put the reduction towards retirement. Then backing out would require losing the retirement saving you were doing (a loss, felt more keenly than the gain of the spending money).

Inherent in this structure is the danger that the middle chapters become wishful fantasies divorced from reality ("I, an unbloodied economist, Know How To Solve All The World's Problems Without Pissing Anyone Off"). The authors attempt to avoid this by citing situations in which nudge-like techniques have worked, for example San Marcos, TX, solved the low college enrolment rate by requiring high schoolers to complete an application form to their local community college before they could graduate (in addition to this, kids were sold hard on the personal advantages of college, such as the earning potential to afford a flash car). See, nudges work! Despite these efforts, this reader was left dissatisfied—perhaps by the authors' advocacy of "our proposals" instead of a humble presentation of "what has worked for others".

I also remain dissatisfied with the authors' blithe dismissal of the dangers of bad nudges. After all, the same techniques could steer someone towards an action that's not in their self-interest. The authors shrug and say "sure, but transparency will help this" and provide two paragraphs of boil-the-ocean political reforms to encourage this. I'd be interested to see how many dubious nudges come about as a result of this book. Perhaps it's because of my time on the Internet, my first-hand appreciation of the very real difference between opt-in marketing and opt-out marketing, that I fear bad nudging is all-to-easy and transparency all-too-hard.

In short, Nudge is an interesting take on cognitive biases and behavioural economics but the long, detailed, and ever-optimistic unveiling of the authors' plans to solve the burning questions in money, health, and even same-sex marriages, turn the work into a study of hubris. And that's before it falls into the hands of someone whose political ends you don't agree with ....

Radar Theme: Digital Democracy

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 0

[This is part of a series of posts that briefly describe the trends that we're currently tracking here at O'Reilly]

We can no longer smugly claim that the Internet exists separate from the law. Copyright, patent, and taxation are all pressing issues. From the other side, we can use our web techniques to fix a broken and corrupt political system.

Watchlist: Larry Lessig, Sunlight Foundation, Greg Elin, MySociety.

House trying to ban twitter and qik?

by Tim O'Reilly | @timoreilly | comments: 4

John Culberson (R-Tex) is trying to stir up a storm on twitter, saying that new house rules being proposed would ban services such as twitter from being used by members of Congress. He points to this letter from the House franking commission. I don't see where it bans any such thing, but he would be more likely than I am to read between the lines.

I'm put off by the very obvious partisanship of his appeal, pinning it on "the Dems," without a lot of substance. I'd guess that if there is something here, this is very much coming from the old guard of both parties. Clearly, it's brain dead.

I still remember a talk I gave to the House staff in 1993 about the internet. I was taken aside beforehand by some members of the House IT department, who beat around the bush for a while. I asked the point, and was told, "Don't get them too excited, because we're not going to give it to them." We saw where that ended up.

I doubt very much that even the old guard will be able to shut down the increased permeability that new media gives to old institutions.

I'd love to hear more from people who know the ins and outs of current politics and transparency policy than I do. I have some queries out. Will report more as I hear it.

What A Tiger Can Do

by Dale Dougherty | @dalepd | comments: 1

This past weekend I watched a superhero fall to incredible lows and rise to unbelievable heights. I wasn't watching one of the manufactured Marvel superheroes on the big screen. I was watching Tiger Woods live on TV. I was watching him create one of the most compelling stories ever in sports. Late Saturday afternoon, I began watching Tiger fight his way into the lead of the tournament as he hobbled around on a bad knee. I wasn't intending to watch much more than a few minutes but I watched until the close of play on Saturday, tuned in again on Sunday for every minute as Tiger lost the lead and then fought back to tie the leader, and then I could not possibly miss the eighteen-hole playoff on Monday. I was not alone on Monday. I saw a report that trading volume was down 9% on Monday, and it was attributed to the distraction of this playoff match. Who could work when Tiger was playing? Who could not be drawn into this story and find themselves completely swept away by the ups and downs, all the while wondering how it would turn out?

Tiger's adversary was Rocco Mediate, a delightful forty-five year old player ranked 158th in the world. Commentators said Rocco was the crowd favorite, and no one could root against Rocco. He was the everyman, given a special opportunity to "play the best player on the planet, one on one." No one truly expected him to win but he played well, fighting back after falling behind by three shots. He had to overcome his own nervousness and settle in to his own game. Incredibly, he had a one shot lead going into the 18th hole. Somehow, it became believable that Rocco might just win.

As much as I liked Rocco, I found myself pulling for Tiger again and again, as he fought back to tie on Sunday and at the end of eighteen holes on Monday. I have always identified with the underdog, and everything about Rocco made me pull for him. (I have rooted for the Dodgers and Red Sox, never the Yankees, who usually won in the end.) Yet, I realized part-way through the tournament that Tiger wasn't simply a favorite; he had become a superhero. I wanted him to win.

On the Monday broadcast, Johnny Miller remarked after Tiger hit an amazing shot out of a fairway trap: "That's a Tiger shot." It's like Tiger called on super-powers. I certainly wanted to believe he had such powers. What's more, Tiger's round of golf revealed a level of vulnerability that made yourself question if you believed in him. He grimaced after shots because of sharp pain in his knee. He was limping down the fairways. It was never automatic that Tiger would win. As the storyline developed, he heroically summoned his own strength, managed to overcome the physical pain, and obtain a victory. In the end, the real battle was not Tiger vs. Rocco; it was each man against himself, as the game of golf isolates for us to see so clearly.

Yesterday, we learned that Tiger won't play the rest of year, as his knee problems were more severe than he let on; he needs additional surgery followed by a long recovery period. It's bad news for golf and for the people who run tournaments. However, Tiger is not merely an action-hero and his accomplishments carry beyond the golf course.

According to Nike's ads, which feature Tiger's father, Earl Woods, Tiger's special strength is his mental toughness. His father says: "'I promise you that you will never meet another person as mentally tough as you in your entire life.' And he hasn't. And he never will." David Brooks writes about Tiger in Tuesday's New York Times, adding that Tiger has become "the beau ideal for golf-loving corporate America, the personification of mental fortitude."

Tiger is the best. You want to watch "best"; you want to see what "best" does; you want to learn from "best". Even the best is not perfect, you realize. You wonder how you measure up against the best and you hope, like Rocco, you don't do too badly.

Does Woods vs. Mediate bring to mind the presidential race: Obama vs. McCain? There's the obvious: black/white, young/old, prodigy/warrior. Both seem worthy for different reasons. But, in the words of the old Exxon ad, who has a Tiger in his tank? I hope that we elect a leader who understands our vulnerability and summons our strengths. I hope that person can find the focus and determination to meet the challenges ahead and see us through to the end. I'd like to believe that one of them will prove to be a Tiger and inspire our confidence. I want the best to lead.

America's Capacity for Change

by Tim O'Reilly | @timoreilly | comments: 30

Peggy Noonan wrote a lovely few paragraphs celebrating America, in the middle of an otherwise somewhat nasty editorial about Hillary Clinton.

A friend sent, by instant message, the AP flash that ran at 16:56 ET on 06-03-2008. There it was suddenly on my screen:

"*** WASHINGTON (AP)—Obama clinches Democratic nomination, making him first black candidate to lead his party."

A great old-school bulletin, and of course it carried a huge and moving message. It is good when barriers fall; it's good when possibilities seem to open up to more people, especially the young, who are always watching....

But what I thought of when the friend sent the flash was something another friend told me months ago. It was the night Mr. Obama won Alabama. My friend was watching on TV, in his suburban den. His 10-year-old daughter walked in, looked, saw "Obama Wins" and "Alabama." She said, "Daddy, we saw a documentary on Martin Luther King Day in school." She said, "That's where they used the hoses." Suddenly my friend saw it new. That's the place they used the water hoses on the civil rights marchers crossing the bridge. And now look. The black man thanking Alabama for his victory.

What kind of place makes a change like this? Only a great nation. We should love it tenderly every day of our lives.

I was having a similar thought the other day, but not about the evolution of our consciousness of race in America, wonderful though that is. I was delighting that, however far we swing from the center, the fact that our presidents can only serve two terms gives us a fresh start. In the dark days of the past seven years, when the possibility of stolen elections as well as misguided policies and even lies leading us into an unnecessary war might lead anyone to think that democracy was on its last legs in America, one might never have thought to be where we are today, with the real possibility of change in Washington. Even on the Republican side, the party outsider, the voice of criticism (at least initially) has become the candidate. How great is it that we allow ourselves to change direction like this?

The momentousness of change in leadership every eight years has been on my mind recently as a result of reading Jay Winik's book, The Great Upheaval, about the simultaneous change of political consciousness that wracked the world in the US, France, and Russia (though there it didn't prevail) in the late eighteenth century. One of the most stirring moments was the story about how George III reacted when he heard that George Washington was stepping down after leading the Continental Army to victory: "If he does that, he will be the greatest man in the world."

If those words don't help you to "see it new," I don't know what will. That a conquering general didn't seize power was once remarkable. That, when called once again to serve, he stepped down after eight years as president, setting a precedent that was eventually signed into law, was an amazing breakthrough. It's hard to remember that it wasn't always this way, anywhere in the world, (and still isn't, as events in Zimbabwe and Burma remind us so painfully right now.)

There's a lot wrong with our country. But there's a lot right, and looming large on the list is our capacity to change, to reinvent ourselves, to rise to great challenges and surmount them. The words of the Constitution (which were echoed by Barack Obama in his speech on race), "to form a more perfect union," remind us that perfection is a journey, the act of improvement, not an end-state. It gives me hope that we'll be willing to rediscover our idealism and tackle hard problems like global warming, global poverty and income inequality, rather than focusing on the banalities of consumer culture.

I'm reminded of a wonderful poem by Rilke, as translated by Robert Bly, The Archaic Torso of Apollo, that touches on how all greatness, all beauty calls forth from us our own aspiration:

Archaic Torso of Apollo

We have no idea what his fantastic head
was like, where the eyeballs were slowly swelling. But
his body now is glowing like a lamp
whose inner eyes, only turned down a little,

hold their flame, shine. If there weren't light, the curve
of the breast wouldn't blind you, and in the swerve
of the thighs a smile wouldn't keep on going
toward the place where the seeds are.

If there weren't light, this stone would look cut off
where it drops so clearly from the shoulders,
its skin wouldn't gleam like the fur of a wild animal,

and the body wouldn't send out light from every edge
as a star does... for there is no place at all
that isn't looking at you. You must change your life.

I remember hearing Bly read that when my daughter Arwen was a tiny baby nearly thirty years ago. The power of the unexpected turn at the end - "You must change your life." - has stayed with me ever since.

The change we seek in America starts with us. (That's why I was moved to end my talk at ETech, Why I love Hackers with another Rilke poem, about the Old Testament story of Jacob wrestling with an angel. I intended it as a kind of introduction to my son-in-law Saul Griffith's talk about the engineering challenges involved in climate change. Saul made clear just what a big job we're in for, but also grounded the scale of the required change in very personal terms, showing for example, that the amount of aluminum required to produce enough solar thermal plants is similar in scale to our current industrial production of soda cans. He did an amazing job of showing the deep relationship between global scale and personal impact.)

Bringing it back around to politics, next up on my political reading list is Susan Griffin's Wrestling with the Angel of Democracy. I was delighted to see that wonderful image of Jacob wrestling with the angel that I used in my ETech talk, the struggle with hard problems that may defeat us yet strengthen us nonetheless, applied in a political context.

I guess this Sunday ramble is a bit of an appeal to all of you, whatever your political persuasion, to wrestle with the angel of democracy in the coming election, to learn about the issues and the candidates, to make your voice heard, and to play your appointed role in the future of our government.

Book review: "The Future of the Internet (And How to Stop It)"

by Andy Oram | @praxagora | comments: 5

Most of us in the computer field have heard more than our fill about the free software movement, the copyright wars, the scourge of spyware and SQL injection attacks, the Great Firewall of China, and other battles for the control of our computers and networks. But your education is stifled until you have absorbed the insights offered by comprehensive thinkers such as Jonathan Zittrain, who presents in this brand new book some critical and welcome anchor points for discussions of Internet policy. Now we have a definitive statement from a leading law professor at Harvard and Oxford, who combines a scholar's insight into legal doctrines with a nitty-gritty knowledge of life on the Internet.

You can read Zittrain for cogent discussions of key issues in copyright, filtering, licensing, censorship, and other pressing issues in computing and networking. But you're rewarded even more if you read this book to grasp fundamental questions of law and society, such as:

• What determines the legitimacy of laws and those who make and enforce them?
• What relationship does the law on the books bear to the law as enforced, and how does the gray area between them affect the evolution of society?
• What is the proper attitude of citizens toward law-makers and regulators, and how much power is healthy for either side to have?
• How can community self-organization stave off the need for heavy-handed legislation--and how, in contrast, can premature legislation preclude constructive solutions by self-organized communities?

Core questions such as these power Zittrain's tour of technology and law on today's networks. "The Future of the Internet" takes us briskly down familiar paths, offering valuable summaries of current debates, but Zittrain also tries always to hack away at the brambles that block the end of each path. Thanks to his unusually informed perspective, he usually--although not always--succeeds in pushing us forward a few meticulously footnoted footsteps.

(continue reading)

Trendalyzer view of the banking crisis

by Jesse Robbins | @jesserobbins | comments: 3

The team at "And Still I Persist" has created their own version of Hans Rosling's "Trendalyzer" (see: Radar post) to visualize the current US banking crisis.

"First lets look at the top 8 banks and their mortgages that are 90+ days late. Below is a flash charting system, feel free to use the controls and experiment. We chart the total assets of the bank along the horizontal axis, the value of loans that go 90+ days late on the vertical, and the size of the circles represent the total loan portfolio for that bank. You can set the charts in motion by hitting the “Play” button and stop them at any time. Hovering over a circle will show you the value for that data point.

Our charts step forward in time for Q1-2002 one quarter at a time, reading directly from the bank’s own FDIC reports. "
Bank Portfolios - 90+ Days Late

See the original article for more about this visualization and the team that created it.

Update: Bruce Henderson invites anybody interested in working with a larger data set to take a look at the OSG Boomerang tool.

Nice Visualization of Candidates' Speeches

by Tim O'Reilly | @timoreilly | comments: 0

Paul Kedrosky pointed to a great visualization of what the candidates are talking about, from the new Dow Jones Insight Election Blog:

Biggest one to note: Health care remains big for the Democrats (24% of all mentions) and small for the GOP (9%). The economy is No. 1 for everyone.

The difference in domestic issue coverage between Obama and Clinton is slight, with the concept of "terrorism" and "health care" being the only places where there is noticeable difference. Obama gets more mentions in close proximity to terrorism to Clinton's edge in health care....

Terrorism continues to be McCain's issue, second only to the economy.

Click on the image above to see a readable copy.

There aren't a lot of details about their methodology, but presumably this is a demonstration of what you get when you subscribe to Dow Jones Insight and can point it to your own topics of interest. Unfortunately, they suffer from the corporate inaccessibility that dooms so many great products to avoidance by early adopters. Rather than giving you any real information, they ask for your info so a sales person can contact you. (I remember having this argument with the folks at Microsoft about their "sign up for a sales call" mapping APIs, before Google blew them all away by providing simple self-service sign-up.)

Nonetheless, this is definitely a blog I'm going to be following from now on.

Lessig '08

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 0

Larry Lessig launches a Lessig '08 site. He says that people have been advising him for and against running for Congress (see Draft Lessig and the Facebook group), that he hasn't decided, and that he's launching a Change Congress movement to implement grassroots change. There's a video, there's a volunteer button, and if you need to think about it, there's an article in The Atlantic about Lessig's amazing goals for reforming politics.